9/24/2012

The NFL has to get this fixed. Soon. The refs lost control of the Ravens/Pats game. The pass interference call against GB was horrible, but the game-changing horrific awful bad wrong call that awarded the win to Seattle was a travesty. Not only did Tate deserve a pass interference, it was clear that the GB safety had the ball first.

The guys on the ESPN set were cowards when Russell Wilson was on set.

– JD

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: You mean shoving a guy before the ball arrives is pass interference? And then “catching” it with one hand while the other guy has control with two isn’t a reception? Get out of here!

Note whom the harshest pejoratives are reserved for. A movie insulting Mohammed is “offensive, disgusting, and reprehensible,” which is almost exactly the same phrase the White House used today to describe Ahmadinejad’s eliminiationist rhetoric towards Israel. Meanwhile, the guy who’s begging Al Qaeda to cut the head off the man who made it is … “inappropriate” and “inflammatory.” I realize that our “partnership” with Pakistan involves lots of funny little quirks, like giving them foreign aid while their intel bureau helps Afghan jihadis kill American soldiers, but can we muster a little extra invective for an honest to goodness government minister who’s calling on terrorists to murder a U.S. citizen? How about “inappropriate, inflammatory, and problematic?” Too sharp?

When host and veteran journalist Barbara Walters kidded Michelle Obama about bringing the president as her “date,” Obama quipped, “I’ve been told I’m just eye candy here.”…

During the show, the Obamas joked about their upcoming anniversary and presented the hosts with White House cloth napkins, golf balls, candy and bottles of Obama’s home-brewed beer. The couple’s 20th anniversary will fall on the day of the first presidential debate, Oct. 3.

More than a week after President Barack Obama’s cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime.

“I know there’s a story in there somewhere,” said Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, referring to Obama’s home invasion and execution-style slaying of Jeff and Sue Finowicz on Apr. 8. “Right now though, it’s probably best to just sit back and wait for more information to come in. After all, the only thing we know for sure is that our president senselessly murdered two unsuspecting Americans without emotion or hesitation.”

Added Meacham, “It’s not so cut and dried.”

. . . .

While Obama has expressed no remorse for the grisly murders—point-blank shootings with an unregistered .38-caliber revolver—many journalists said it would be irresponsible for the press to sensationalize the story.

“There’s been some debate around the office about whether we should report on this at all,” Washington Post senior reporter Bill Tracy said while on assignment at a local dog show. “It’s enough of a tragedy without the press jumping in and pointing fingers or, worse, exploiting the violence. Plus, we need to be sensitive to the victims’ families at this time. Their loved ones were brutally, brutally murdered, after all.”

The editors of the L.A. Times finally decided on a story criticizing Mitt Romney for rushing to judgment on Obama’s guilt based on nothing but a videotaped confession, DNA and ballistics evidence, and the testimony of 49 eyewitnesses.

Recently, a YouTube clip emerged that appeared to show Barack Obama supporting the concept of “redistribution”:

Then NBC News came up with the next sentence, and Media Matters and other partisan fact checkers started claiming that the clip had been taken out of context. At the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler gave the Romney campaign four Pinocchios — four Pinocchios — for saying the clip was about redistribution of wealth. Declared Kessler:

But now NBC News has obtained the rest of Obama’s comments, and it is clear his remarks were taken completely out of context. Obama is not talking about redistributing wealth at all — instead, he speaks about competition, the market place and innovation in an effort to improve government services in Chicago.

Now Charles C. Johnson (the “good Charles Johnson,” not the crazy one) at the Daily Caller provides the full audio of the entire Obama appearance. And the full context shows Obama was talking about redistribution of wealth — not in the sense of a direct and naked transfer of money, but in the more indirect but still very real sense of using government money (coming from richer taxpayers, obviously) to redistribute resources and services to the “working poor.”

As a public service, I have transcribed the entire relevant portion of Obama’s discussion surrounding the redistribution remark. At the Daily Caller’s clip this is from 24:40 to 31:28.

What you are about to read initially looks like gobbeldygook. But here’s the argument Obama is making. He says that although he disagrees with the 1996 welfare reform law, that law was fortunate because it desegregated the class of people needing government benefits. That group used to be just poor urban blacks, he said, but now it’s a larger group of “working poor” spanning different races and geographic areas. Obama sees this as an opportunity to build “coalitions” and do “organizing” to build political support for a wide range of government services for this group.

Put simply: Obama is saying that he wants to help the people who are considered black and therefore “undeserving,” by lumping them together with non-blacks into a group he can call the working poor. In this way, he can get enough votes to use government to redistribute resources to the whole group.

As part of this discussion, Obama says that he is trying to counter what he considers a “propaganda campaign” against the use of government to solve the problems of the working poor. It is in this context that Obama speaks of the need to “pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution — because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.”

How Glenn Kessler thinks that pooling resources to “make sure everybody’s got a shot” has absolutely nothing to do with redistribution of wealth (four Pinocchios!!) is a mystery that only Kessler can explain.

For now, though, I am content to give Kessler FIVE PINOCCHIOS for his lazy and deceptive criticism.

One very important point in the transcript below: Obama makes repeated references to “Aurie” and the wonderful work she was supposedly doing on “organizing” and “diversity.” For example:

I think that the wonderful work that Aurie and many of you do in the areas of diversity is absolutely vital and there are some significant policy questions around housing and desegregation that have been intractable but have to be addressed.

As the full audio makes clear, “Aurie” is Aurie Pennick, an “affordable housing” guru who championed the idea of moving Section 8 housing recipients into wealthier areas to better their lives. The idea was to destroy the housing projects and give Section 8 recipients vouchers, and developers low income tax credits to build “affordable housing” in more racially “diverse” areas, so that welfare recipients would not be confined to the slums. You hear Obama make direct reference to the idea near the end of the transcribed remarks, where he contrasts building “Robert Taylor” Homes, a Chicago housing project, with the idea of “low income tax credits that are being provided to community development corporations to build scattered-site low-rise housing in mixed income communities.”

The problem with these ideas is that this particular type of redistribution of wealth — giving money to poor people for government-sponsored housing in wealthier areas — arguably increases crime in the neighborhoods where Section 8 recipients move. The evidence for this proposition has been criticized, but I challenge the authors of the criticism to move to the communities where Section 8 recipients are abundant, to put their criticisms to the test.